LuxCoreRender 2.6 and BlendLuxCore 2.6 ship
The VR Dream, a short animation by freelance artist Damien Monteillard, rendered in LuxCoreRender 2.6.
The LuxCoreRender team has released version 2.6 of the open-source physically based renderer and BlendLuxCore, its Blender integration plugin.
The update improves colour management workflow in the software, including support for OpenColorIO 2.0 and OpenColorIO tonemapping, and makes parsing of mesh lights “about 3x faster”.
A hybrid CPU/GPU unbiased render engine, formerly known as LuxRender
Formerly known as LuxRender, LuxCoreRender was rebooted in 2018 with a change of name, a new project website, forum and online documentation.
It’s a physically based render engine with a range of production features and, as of LuxCoreRender 2.0, supports hybrid C++/OpenCL rendering on CPUs and GPUs.
LuxCoreRender 2.6: support for OpenColorIO 2.0, better parsing of mesh lights
The 2.6 update improves colour management workflow in the software, with LuxCoreRender becoming the latest DCC app to support OpenColorIO 2 (OCIO 2), the new version of the colour management standard.
OpenColorIO colour spaces are supported for texture maps, materials and lights, and for tonemapping.
The update also improves performance when calculating lighting with parsing of mesh lights now “about 3x faster”, and “partial” support for CPU multi-threading when preprocessing light sources.
Other changes include improvements to out-of-core GPU rendering and denoising with Open Image Denoise (OIDN), Intel’s CPU-based render denoising system.
Outside the core application, LoL, the free online library of materials and 3D models for LuxCoreRender users has been updated with new models of real-world furniture set out in this thread on BlenderArtists.org.
System requirements and availability
LuxCoreRender 2.6 is available under an Apache 2.0 licence for Windows, Linux and macOS.
BlendLuxCore 2.6 is compatible with Blender 2.82-2.93. It doesn’t currently work with Blender 3.0. A new 3ds Max integration plugin, MaxToLux, is available in early access for 3ds Max 2019-2021.